According to a new report from PwC, the UK’s music streaming sector will continue to grow rapidly between 2018-2022.

The accountancy giant has released their annual Entertainment & Media Outlook report, predicting that the value of UK music streaming will grow from £779 million in 2018 to £1.4 billion in 2022.

“The growth in music streaming shows no signs of slowing down,” said Mark Maitland, PWC’s head of entertainment & media. “We forecast revenues to increase by 19% year-on-year until 2022, as consumers move away from music ownership through downloads to music access via streaming. Over this same period, ticket sales for live music will remain largely flat, growing at 0.3% year-on-year and we forecast revenue from streaming to overtake live ticket sales in 2020.”

Streaming services represented the largest share of the global recorded music market in 2017, as it grew by 8.1% to $17.3bn. The UK’s major DSPs (digital service providers) have accelerated innovation and development as the competition between streaming companies intensifies.

The streaming service battle has intensified this year

YouTube has recently announced YouTube Music, a brand new streaming service launched by the video-sharing giant. As YouTube launches its platform, Spotify has furthered the development of its free service. Spotify is also expanding its machine learning driven playlist portfolio, to make the user experience more socially engaging and increase interest in its activity feed.

Mark Maitland, UK head of entertainment and media at PwC, said: “We see the UK’s entertainment and media sectors making a strong contribution to economic growth over the next four years. The main drivers of growth will be the technology and digital companies, which are redefining the competitive playing field to the point where the borders that once separated media, technology and telecoms are dissolving to create a third revolution of convergence.”

According to the report, the entire UK entertainment and media sector will be worth £76bn by 2022, a massive £68bn increase from the end of this year.

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